Pop Culture Allusions

The Lion King: An Allusion to Shakespeare's Hamlet

The intended audience for this movie is a younger children audience. This film is rated G for general audience(all ages admitted). The purpose of The Lion King is to show how destiny can change a person's life in an instant. Every person(or animal, in this case) has a purpose in the life that they live and the decision that they need to make is what they will do with that purpose in life.

The allusion to Hamlet impacts the original message in every way imaginable in The Lion King. The Lion King follows the plot of Hamlet very closely. In the perspective of the protagonist, the king and father of the kingdom dies, he sees the ghost of his dad, he is banished from the land, his uncle takes over the territory, he ponders life and goes on a journey by himself, and he comes back and kills the king. Like it says in the explanation clip above, Mufassa is Hamlet 1, Simba is Hamlet, Sarabi is Gertrude, Scar is Claudius, Nala is Ophelia, Rafiki is Horatio, Hyena is Laeretes, and Timon and Pumbaa are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

The scene after Scar is killed in The Lion King, Simba goes back to Pride Rock and takes over the kingdom as his own. If the writers decided to remove this scene from the movie and instead have Simba die also(like in the play Hamlet) , I'm not sure this movie would be as famous as it is today. Disney is especially known for the happy endings of his movies, so that would be horrible for the business and true message of Disney's movies. I know from experience that when I was little, my favorite parts of Disney movies was always the end because all of the characters lived happily ever after.